Filthy showers, uncleared rubbish, mice infestation. The quality of housing provided to asylum seekers by commercial contractors is poor indeed, but good enough for the Home Office.

Back yard of a G4S house in Sheffield (Grayson)

Ibrahim is a Syrian refugee living
in asylum housing in South Yorkshire. His accommodation is run for the
government by the security company, G4S. Ibrahim told his story at one of a
series of campaign meetings held by asylum rights organisations in Sheffield
and Doncaster this past summer to persuade local councils to help and resettle Syrians. Ibrahim had
been waiting six months already — not for a decision on his asylum claim, but
for his initial interview to set out his case.

In the North of England there are
dozens, probably hundreds of Syrians, some with children, who over the past
year have waited and waited for their first interview, dumped in overcrowded
slum housing on a meagre income.

Ibrahim was trafficked into the UK.
There are more than a hundred Syrians at present in Calais trying to reach
families in the UK. Ibrahim’s wife and children are trapped in Egypt without
documents, unable even to receive money from banks or money services. They have
been told to leave Egypt and their only exit
route will be by sea. Ibrahim is distraught. Seven
hundred migrants died in the Mediterranean in September, amongst them
Syrians fleeing from the Libyan and Egyptian coasts.

Francois

Francois is African, now in G4S
asylum housing in South Yorkshire. He has recently emerged from two months in a
UK detention centre. On arriving by air he was advised by French speaking
African groups in a northern city to claim asylum. He borrowed money and
travelled by coach to Lunar House in Croydon, the UK visas and immigration
headquarters, to register his claim for asylum. Without warning he was
handcuffed and told that he would be detained.

He described the detention
centre, Harmondsworth, near London’s Heathrow airport, as being like a
prison. He says he was locked in a shared cell for twelve hours a day. For one
two-week period he was confined to the cell block, unable to get out into the
open air.

Francois was placed on the ‘fast
track’, a means by which the Home Office can rapidly deport people new arrivals
seeking asylum. (This ‘fast track’ was recently declared
unlawful; the Home Office is appealing.)

Although Francois is
French-speaking, the official documents were given to him in English. Despite
suffering from clinical depression he received no medical support in detention
from staff, and no interpreter. Fortunately for Francois, the charity Medical
Justice obtained medical help for him and a volunteer support worker. They and
his solicitor persuaded the Home Office that Francois had grounds for a new
asylum claim.

Mohammed

I spoke by phone to Mohammed. He is
housed at the initial accommodation centre in Birmingham that’s run by G4S, the
world’s biggest security company (which continues to win UK government
contracts, despite repeated failures and being the subject of a criminal investigation by the
Serious Fraud Office). After a maximum of 21 days at the centre Mohammed is
supposed to be moved on to asylum housing. But for four months now he has been
bounced between the accommodation centre and an expensive city hotel.

Mouse droppings, G4S house, Sheffield (Grayson)

Shafiq

Shafiq spoke to me in a night
shelter on the edge of Coventry city centre, at an afternoon meeting of asylum
seekers sharing food and support. He told me how he led a boycott of meals at
the G4S-run Birmingham accommodation centre: “Around twenty of us had had
enough. A slice of toast and tea for breakfast, a little rice with tasteless
stuff for other meals …the meals were disgusting.” Shafiq said that the
catering people blamed the tiny amount of money they were given to spend.

Juliet

In a terraced house in Sheffield
Juliet told me about her time in Angel Lodge, the G4S-run initial
accommodation centre in the grounds of Wakefield prison. Placed there with her
new born baby, she was appalled at the quality of food – and frightened too. One
day in March, she said, all the
children went down with food poisoning. “We did not complain, we were worried
what would happen to us if we did.”

Juliet had
been trafficked from West Africa into sex work in the UK. She escaped and
claimed asylum. She was then sent to Angel Lodge and on to G4S asylum housing
in Sheffield. When she was still recovering from her Caesarean G4S dumped
Juliet and her baby in a tiny attic room with two flights of steep winding
stairs (see picture, left). There was no safety gate nor a secure door to the attic.

When she
arrived at the property Juliet asked not to be left there. G4S said she was on
a waiting list for more suitable accommodation and told her sleeping downstairs
in the shared lounge was against the rules. Juliet, with her fear of authority,
complied and descended into major depression.

She had
escaped her traffickers and claimed asylum but still all her asylum claim
documents were sent to her with the name the traffickers had given her on the
false passport they had used. The Home Office knew her real name which she had
put on her claim; she had protested, but still her trafficked name kept
appearing at her letter box. She was left in these conditions for four months
until campaigners alerted Sheffield council who served a notice on the
property. Only then did G4S move her.

A toxic debate

Ibrahim,
Francois, Juliet, Mohammed and Shafiq have joined the expanding G4S asylum
housing population at a time when the debate around immigration is especially
toxic and the provision of housing to asylum seekers is being degraded through
privatisation.

UK governments have been
“dispersing” asylum seekers from London and the South East to the old
industrial areas of the North, the Midlands, Scotland and Wales since 2000. In
2012 the Home Office packaged up asylum housing as a market and awarded
contracts to G4S, Serco and Reliance. Through 2013 and 2014 flows of refugees
have been increasing in particular from war torn Syria, Eritrea and ongoing
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In June 2014 national figures for asylum
housing were up 36 per cent from the start of the privatisation contracts in
2012 (from 20,594 to 27,963), South Yorkshire saw an increase of 56 per cent
(from 1085 to 1688).There were around 400 people in asylum housing in Barnsley
in June and around 700 in Sheffield by October. Of course not all those
claiming asylum seek support and accommodation, so numbers of refugees claiming
asylum will be significantly higher.

This rise in numbers comes at a time when politicians
and the media have constructed a toxic discourse around immigration. For the
first time for many years the term “asylum seekers” is again being demonised
alongside “illegals”, ”migrants”, “foreigners”, or “immigrants”.

G4S houses, SheffieldG4S has repeatedly refused to
invest in new capacity in its centres in Wakefield and Birmingham, simply
saying at meetings that they are looking for sites and buildings. The National
Audit Office Report
of January 2014 reminded G4S of its obligations:

“Under the contract providers are
required to maintain a flexible portfolio of properties to meet changing demand.”

Instead G4S has waited for numbers
to rise and then tried to find the cheapest and most available private rented
properties, regardless of longstanding Home Office agreements with local
authorities on numbers and housing standards. The company’s policy of packing
in single men into cheap slum housing in Rotherham drew public rebukes from
Rotherham Council and the National Audit
Office in 2013. The NAO Report said of Rotherham:

“The town currently has the highest number of asylum
seekers in the region, including higher numbers than in Leeds, the biggest city
in the area. The Department has asked G4S to reduce the numbers accommodated in
Rotherham to a more sustainable level.”

From June 2014 G4S had to stop
allocations in Rotherham for four months.

There are now not enough places for the asylum seekers coming through.

Meltdown

The
Home Office and Clearel, its contractor in London and the South East, have been
placing newly arrived asylum seekers in budget hotels in Croydon and
Folkestone. Rayah Feldman of the Hackney Migrant Centre reports that in London:

“The
system seems to be in meltdown. All the people have now been moved from the
hotel which got the publicity but we don't know where to.”

G4S back yard, SheffieldThe
mess that the Home Office and their commercial contractors have made serves to
fuel the anti-asylum seeker rhetoric.

In
the North West of England Serco’s initial accommodation centre in Liverpool was
already overwhelmed in December 2013 when 100 asylum seekers and their families
were sent for nine weeks to a
hotel in Manchester at a cost of £400,000, according to the DailyTelegraph.

“While
millions of Britons are living on and below the bread line, asylum seekers are
living a life of four-star luxury courtesy of the taxpayer,” a UKIP spokesman
told the Express, whose editorial
claimed that a “surge in arrivals” of asylum seekers had caused the resort to
hotels. The Express asserted, predictably,
that “More must be done to prevent asylum seekers getting into the country
including more stringent border controls.”

Placing
asylum seekers and their children in hotels and constantly moving them means
real difficulties in accessing GP’s and voluntary health checks. One former
senior local council asylum worker told me: “There is no way that the Home
Office is safeguarding children, in these hotels”.

An
NHS specialist nurse said: “We don’t think we have missed anyone for their
health check in the hotels…but who knows?” Claims for asylum are being slowed
because of difficulties in contacting interpreters and solicitors. Maurice Wren
of the Refugee Council has protested that asylum seekers
are “being shuttled around and pushed from pillar to post” after fleeing
horrifying experiences in their homelands and that the focus should be on the
plight of the refugees.

A dangerous brew

Last time the numbers of asylum seekers rose, the
then Labour government’s panic dispersal policies led to racist attacks on asylum seekers. An official Home Office report
of 2005 covering 77 local authorities stated bluntly:

“The
government’s policy of dispersing asylum seekers is creating long term
‘ghettos’ in deprived areas where they are more
likely to suffer racial assaults and harassment…The procurement of housing
in the poorest areas polarises entrenched views held by the host community
against the incomers.”

Tom Vickers of
Northumbria University quotes a national survey in 2005 in which 83 per cent of female asylum
seekers and refugees who participated said that they did not go out at night
because they feared abuse and harassment.

In towns such as Middlesbrough and Rotherham where
G4S has concentrated its largest numbers of asylum seekers, councillors have
expressed concerns that G4S is placing asylum seekers in areas where the Far
Right is strong. Middlesbrough Councillors have complained off the record to
researchers that G4S is simply not telling them where asylum seekers are being
placed. Rotherham is a particularly volatile area to house asylum seekers, with
regular EDL demonstrations, a major UKIP stronghold now and with constant high
profile racialised issues around child sexual abuse; and also anti-Gypsyism
aimed at local Roma communities.

Stirring the pot

Sheffield MP, and former Home Secretary, David
Blunkett has made matters worse. Writing under the
Daily Mail’s “Right Minds” banner, Blunkett supported Tory minister Michael Fallon in his assertion that
immigrants are ‘swamping’ communities. Blunkett wrote:

“This
storm [over Fallon’s outburst] echoed the experience I went through 12 years
ago when I, too, used the word ‘swamped’ to describe the anxious feelings of
people who were facing the dispersal of large numbers of asylum seekers into
their own hard-pressed Northern communities.”

Blunkett should know better. In Rotherham hate
crimes have sharply increased
over the summer. In Barnsley hate crimes, the majority of them racist, are
up by 100 per cent; there have been around 150 reported in the first eight
months of the year. A large former mining area bordering Barnsley, Rotherham
and Doncaster — the Dearne Valley — has been declared a no go area for asylum
housing by the local councils and the Home Office for many years. The area was
a stronghold of the BNP (British National Party) during the period from 2005
-2011 when the far right party was standing candidates in all Barnsley local
government wards.

Democratic accountability?

In the early summer there was an unprecedented
protest about G4S from local councils in Yorkshire citing, “a number of difficulties in the management of the
COMPASS contract”, and “tensions between the main contractor, some of the
sub-contractors, and local partners”.

All ten local Council leaders in Yorkshire where
G4S had housing signed a letter to the Minister of State for Immigration asking
him for a meeting to discuss these issues. The Minister agreed to meet representatives
of the local authorities.

Regardless
of local councils’ wishes, wherever you look in the G4S asylum housing scene
you find the now familiar
pattern of overcrowded, often slum property with little privacy or respect
offered to tenants. In Coventry asylum tenants and refugees have formed
CARAG (Coventry Asylum and Refugee Action Group) to challenge G4S and its
degrading housing. On the 30th of July tenants and supporters held a
meeting with a representative of G4s; the
Carag website reports:

“People discussed problems
involving repairs taking forever, inaccessible housing for people with medical
conditions. Male staff intruding upon female service users. Also the complaints
procedure was found to be insufficient and not fit for purpose…[the Birmingham
accommodation centre] which is a hostel meant to be initial accommodation in the short term for
21 days had people being left for more than four months.”

Bath/shower in a G4S house in Sheffield (Grayson)

An open prison for migrants?

Asylum housing is seen by many tenants as a form of house arrest – a ‘soft detention’ after often brutal experience of detention centres. Antony Loewenstein, an Australian journalist researching immigration detention in the UK was taken in August to G4S asylum HMO’s (Houses in Multiple Occupation) in Sheffield where tenants were recovering from traumatic experiences in detention centres. He wrote about his visit:

“When detainees are released, they still often face indefinite insecurity. In Sheffield, I visited G4S housing in one of the poorest areas of the city. On a windy summer day, with Roma children playing in the streets, I saw squalid houses with up to nine men packed into small rooms. I heard stories about the Home Office taking years to reach a decision on immigration claims, which precludes many migrants from building a decent life, given their lack of work rights.”

Sheffield campaigners know these
asylum housing conditions only too well — tiny attic rooms, uncleared
rubbish inside and outside, mice infestations and filthy showers. All in breach of G4S’s contract obligations
and some in clear breach of housing law.

These are the degrading housing
conditions offered by the UK to deter new asylum seekers. To create a ‘hostile
environment’ so that refugees will simply ‘Go Home’.

John Grayson is an independent researcher and adult educator. He is an
activist and campaigner with SYMAAG (South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum
Action Group). He writes regularly for openDemocracy and for the Institute of
Race Relations news service www.irr.org.uk

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